Images courtesy of Paramount
Film Therapy
Writer/director Noah Baumbach, Nicole Kidman, and Jennifer Jason Leigh exorcise their demons in Margot at the Wedding
By Amy Westervelt
Published: October 26th, 2007 | 10:28am
I've got a real thing for Noah Baumbach movies. When I was younger, I used people's reactions to his debut film Kicking and Screaming as a gauge for how similar they were to me, whether they would get my sense of humor. In it, Baumbach captured perfectly the post-college, what now? years, with a tight script and a fantastic cast that included Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz, and a snarky Chris Eigeman. In addition to writing and/or directing two more of my favorites, The Squid and the Whale and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Baumbach tends to cast my favorite actresses in his films. From a sassy co-ed Parker Posey to Angelica Houston in Zissou, and Laura Linney as the dysfunctional but lovable mother modeled after Baumbach's own in The Squid and the Whale. The Squid and the Whale was his first stab at writing and directing a personal story and Baumbach's latest, Margot at the Wedding, seems to be sort of a continuation of that story, except that the characters have different names. The former focuses on a divorce and its effects on a family. The mother, played by Laura Linney, is a successful writer who cheats on her husband and sometimes ignores her children. In Margot, Nicole Kidman, who looks a bit like Linney (perhaps Baumbach's own mother is tall, thin, and blond?), plays the titular character — a successful writer who plans to leave her husband for another man and sometimes has a hard time putting her children before herself. Pattern?
Baumbach's latest follows his mother, er, character to her sister's wedding, with her prepubescent son in tow. Margot hasn't spoken to her sister Pauline, played by Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh (another favorite!), since she published a story in The New Yorker, quoting word-for-word her sister's issues with her now-ex husband. But sis is getting married and it's time to let bygones be bygones. Or so Margot pretends until we discover that she's running away from her husband and her lover just happens to live down the street from her sister. Various problems unfold as Margot picks away at everyone else's problems and remains completely blind to her own. In one scene she describes a character from one of her stories and it's clear that she is describing her image of herself — someone who cares so much about other people that she has nothing left for herself, and so she sometimes needs to leave those people in order to regain her persona. Meanwhile, her son, who clearly adores his mother, is routinely disappointed by her. She also has a nasty habit of barraging him with insults when she's feeling down about herself.
Dysfunction, dysfunction, dysfunction, sexual overtones and undertones, a few laughs here and there. Frankly, it all gets a bit trying by the end. We've all got our own family get-togethers to attend if we want to see the effects of meddlesome, self-righteous women who only see what everyone else is doing wrong. JJL and her intended, Pete, played by Jack Black in a surprise casting decision, provide comic relief and a beacon in the darkness, but of course Margot works her black magic on their happiness too. The love-hate relationship between Baumbach and his mother/character is complex and interesting, but you can't help feeling by the end that you might have been better off just reading a short story about it, and Baumbach might have better spent his time in a therapy session.
Issue #35
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